The Most Secret Rosary of the Philosophers

other things. Therefore, unless the Sun is most pure and Mercury has been converted and died, it remains alone; but if it has died, it brings much fruit, and from where it seemed to have lost what it was, from there it begins to appear as what it was not. Whoever, therefore, is ignorant of its destruction necessarily must be ignorant of its construction through the act of nature. It is, however, calcined and dissolved with the greatest labor without utility. You do not need other bodies, therefore, when you can have in these that which is of greater temperance and less dross. If, however, you need the use of them, it is necessary first that they be converted into the species of perfect ones, and only then to begin the operation upon them. It is possible, however, that one might work on them, since in all bodies there is knowledge, but they will not be as good as those aforesaid, because in the greater work, all diminished bodies are not of one perfection, since they do not enter into it until they have been, in the subtlety of composition, like perfect bodies. Yet the white and the red sprout from one root, with no body of another kind intervening: for the Moon in